Kiss and Make-Up: A Memoir

By Gene Simmons

You wanted the truth, you got the truth—the hottest book in the world!

Fueled by an explosive mix of makeup, costumes, and attitude, KISS burst onto the music scene thirty years ago and has become a rock institution. The band has sold more than eighty million records, has broken every concert attendance record set by Elvis Presley and the Beatles, stands behind the Beatles alone in number of gold records from any group in history, and has spawned more than 2,500 licenses.

There would have been no KISS without Gene Simmons, the outrageous star whose superlong tongue, legendary sexual exploits, and demonic makeup have made him a rock icon. KISS and Make-Up is the wild, shocking, unbelievable story, from the man himself, about how an immigrant boy from Israel studied to be a rabbi, was saved by rock and roll, and became one of the most notorious rock stars the world has ever seen.
Before Gene Simmons there was Chaim Witz, a boy from Haifa, Israel, who had no inkling of the life that lay ahead of him. In vivid detail Gene recounts his childhood growing up in Haifa under the watchful eye of his beloved, strong-willed mother, a concentration camp survivor; his adolescent years attending a Jewish theological center for rabbinical studies in Brooklyn; his love of all things American, including comic books, superheroes, and cowboys; and his early fascination with girls and sex, which prompted him to start a rock band in school after he saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.

KISS and Make-Up is not just the classic story of achieving the American dream through the eyes of an immigrant boy making good, but a juicy, rollicking rock and roll read that takes you along for the ride of your life with KISS, from the 1970s, when they were the biggest band in the world, through the ’80s, when they took off their world-famous war paint, and into the ’90s, when they came back bigger and badder than ever to become the number one touring band in the world.

In his own irreverent, unapologetic voice, Gene talks about the girls (4,600 of them and counting); his tight bond with KISS cofounder Paul Stanley; the struggles he and Paul had with Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and their departures from the group; the new band members and Eric Carr’s untimely death; the enormous love and affection he has for the people who put him there in the first place—the KISS Army and the ever-loyal KISS fans around the world; his love life, including stories about his relationships with Cher and Diana Ross and with Shannon Tweed, Playmate of the Year, mother of his son and daughter, and his companion of eighteen years; and much more.

Full of dozens of photographs, many never-before-seen pictures from Gene’s private collection, KISS and Make-Up is a surprising, intimate look at the man behind the mask. For the first time Gene reveals all the facets of his complex personality—son, rock star, actor, record producer, businessman, ladies’ man, devoted father, and now author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown
• Release date: Dec 11, 2001
• ISBN: 9781400045235

Gene Simmons

Known as rock's ultimate showmen, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons founded the hard rock supergroup KISS in the early 1970s. Since then, KISS has sold more than eighty million albums and performed more than two thousand shows around the world, and is still touring today.

Book preview

great expectations:

ISRAEL 1949–1958

I was born August 25, 1949, in a hospital in Haifa, Israel, overlooking the Mediterranean. At birth, I was named Chaim Witz: Chaim is a Hebrew word that means life, and Witz was my father’s last name. Just a year earlier, Israel had become independent after roughly 100 million Arabs tried to prevent Israel from appearing on the world map.

The war for Israel’s independence followed in the wake of an earlier war, World War II, and the terrible plan of the German Nazis to erase Jews from Europe and eventually from the world. My mother’s parents were Hungarian Jews, and my mother had grown up in Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s. When my mother was fourteen, she was sent to the concentration camps, where she saw most of her family wiped out in the gas chambers. While in the camps, she ended up doing the hair of the commandant’s wife, so she was shielded from many of the horrors that befell the other Jews. Having survived that horrific time, after the war she went to Israel. I think the survival instinct was so strong among that generation that, after leaving the camps, they couldn’t imagine failing at anything else, and so they set out for this strange new land.

I was posing with my mother and a hammer—for some reason I loved hammers.

Israel was a new country, only a year older than I was, and its existence was still very much in question. But I was unaware of all that. It was always such a part of my daily routine that I wasn’t able to separate it from any other aspect of my experience. For example, I remember that my dad, Yechiel (or Feri) Witz—who was physically imposing, at least six foot five—would come in on the weekends with his machine gun and put it on the kitchen table. The front lines were fifty miles away, and everybody, every male and most females, was in the army. There were no exemptions. If you lived there, you were in the army.

We were poor, but I was chilly, so my mother sewed me this coat from the blanket I slept in. I was chewing on a pretzel here at age two.

The gun on the table was one of the few things I remember about my father, because he wasn’t around very much. I do recall that he was this large, powerful being with a large, powerful presence. One vivid memory does stand out. Once there was a mouse in the house, and it ran across the room and under the couch, and I remember my dad picking up the couch and holding it up on one side with one arm while he was trying to shoo the mouse away with the other. I couldn’t believe it. A man lifting up a couch? This was like nothing I had ever seen before. It seemed impossible.

Chaim, Flora, and Feri Witz.

I had polio when I was a very young child, probably when I was about three years old. Apparently, I lost most of my muscle control from the waist down. The doctors were worried that it would get worse and sent me to the hospital. In the hospital, I was kept off the ward, in isolation, and when my mother and father came by, they had to communicate with me through a closed window. For some reason, even at that young age, I had a strong sense of what was proper and what was improper, and I knew that it was improper to go to the bathroom in your own bed. My mother potty-trained me early on. She showed me the toilet and explained what it was for. At that time, there were no diapers in Israel, and I learned quickly that the bed was for sleeping, and the bathroom was for your other business. It was very clear. In the hospital, in the ward, I needed to get out of the bed and use the bathroom. I complained and cried and complained some more. I knew I needed to get to the bathroom. I knew that any other solution to that problem was the wrong solution. But the nurse didn’t come, and somehow I managed to pull myself over the baby crib and did my business on the floor, while I hung on to the side of the crib. Then the nurse came. She wasn’t around when I was in trouble, but the minute there was poop on the floor, she came right by, and she started yelling at me, wondering why I had gone right outside the crib. And my mother stormed right in and screamed at her for not being there for me. What did you expect him to do? she said. Go in his own bed? He’s a good boy. He knows better. In her eyes, I could do no wrong.

I was always a loner, even though I had friends. I spent time by myself, observing things, organizing the world around me in my own mind. For example, I was fascinated with beetles. In Israel, they had these huge Old Testament beetles. The beetles here in America are nothing compared to them. These Israeli beetles were the size of small dinosaurs, maybe two inches long. They were brightly colored and beautiful. They looked like jewels. And I used to tie sewing thread around the neck of these beetles and put them in matchboxes along with a little bit of sugar. The beetles would live there until I opened up the box, and then they would fly around, still tied to my thread.

As I got older, I became less of a loner. Instead, I became more interested in showing off around other kids and getting attention. So I changed from the kind of kid who would be a falconer for beetles, letting them fly around at the end of a leash of thread, to the kind of kid who would put a beetle in his mouth and let it walk around in there. Other kids were amazed by that. They thought it was disgusting and brave. Most important, they couldn’t look away.

Though I was born in Haifa, my family lived in a place nearby, a little village called Tirat Hacarmel, which is named for the original biblical Mount Carmel. And I remember as a kid climbing that mountain, which is more of a hill, really, rolling hills, similar to southern California’s hills. I remember going up the hill and picking cactus fruit when I was a kid, then climbing back down and selling the fruit at the bus depot for half a pruta, which is basically half a penny. (Cactus fruit are sweet and juicy on the inside, but have spikes on the outside. Their Hebrew name is sabra, and that’s what Israelis are called, because they, too, are prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside.)

Living in Israel among all the other sabras was strange, especially in school, because Israeli classrooms taught this quirky mix of history, religion, and politics. Think of it: in class, we were taught about an old book called the Bible and were told that the events recounted in this book—incredible events, really—actually took place in the country where we were living. It was a strange notion to swallow and to understand. Because here was a whole book that talked about the creation of life, and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the flood and the Exodus. And then we were told, This is where it happened. You’re living in the place. It was pretty heavy stuff.

At the same time, I wasn’t really all that conscious of being Jewish in Israel, because almost everyone was the same as I was in that respect. Clearly there were Arabs walking down the street, and there were some Christians, but I was oblivious to all that. I was not aware of anything except being Israeli. You’d think that my mother, having just come through the war and the concentration camps, would have been consumed with what had happened to her, but she wasn’t. It was too painful for her to talk about. She never discussed the camps and rarely talked about her childhood in Hungary. All she ever talked about, and only every once in a great while, was that the world is a big place, and there are some good people and some bad people. To this day, I am amazed that she had that self-control. It’s proof that my mother, ethically, morally, and in all other ways, is a much better person than I will ever be. She had at that time, and still has, an abiding trust in humanity. She still believed the world is a good place, and that goodness prevails over evil more often than not. I don’t know that I would have had that point of view if I had lived through what she had.

When you’re a kid, you don’t know that people are different races, different ethnicities, different religions. The one thing I did notice about my neighborhood was that it was filled with different languages. Some of the Jews in Israel spoke Hebrew. Some spoke Yiddish, which is a European language that combines Hebrew and German. In my house, the most important language was Hungarian, because my mother didn’t really speak Hebrew all that well. And then later, when my mother went to work, it was Turkish and then Spanish, because my baby-sitter was Turkish and the next-door neighbors were Spanish. At an early age I was able to speak Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, and Spanish.

I was not aware of America or the rest of the world. But I do remember my mother taking me to a movie. I must have been four. It was my first experience with non-reality-based images. I had never seen a television set, and I had heard radio only occasionally. We went to the movie, but we couldn’t afford to go inside, so my mother held me in her lap outside of the theater, and we watched the movie, which was shown on a big screen without a roof. It was amazing. I was transfixed. Later, I remembered that it was Broken Arrow, with Jimmy Stewart and Jeff Chandler. But at the time, all I could see were huge images of cowboys and Indians and a mythical Wild West where there were outlaws and heroes. Cowboys were the first superheroes, as far as I was concerned, the first characters who were larger than life and more powerful than ordinary people. As important as all of this became to me later—the concept of heroes, and the magic of the movies—what made the greatest impression on me was the sound of American English. That might have been the first time I heard English, and it sounded funny to me. It was one of the languages that, as a kid in Israel, we mimicked. To my ears, the American language had its own sound, with lots of y’s, and lots of soft r’s. These sounds didn’t exist in Hebrew. That was my fake English, and it sounded pleasant to me.

From the beginning, it seemed, my father and mother would separate. A simple conflict lay at the heart of my parents’ bad marriage. My mother, Flora, was extremely beautiful as a young woman. She had classic movie star looks, like Ava Gardner. In the village where they came from in Europe—Jand, Hungary—she was considered quite a catch, but not as big a catch as my father. He was highly valued because he was the tallest in the village, probably six-five or six-six, although I remember him as even bigger. In my memory he was six-nine, a giant. Though his name is Yechiel in Hebrew, he was called Feri in Hungarian. When they met and married, they were young, in their early twenties, and during the first few years of their marriage, my mother gradually woke up to the idea that my father wasn’t going to be the kind of provider she needed. For some reason, he could never make ends meet. He could never run a business successfully. He was not really a pragmatist. He was more of a dreamer. And for a carpenter, being a dreamer was roughly equivalent to being unemployed. He would make pieces of furniture that he loved but nobody else liked, and he would find to his surprise that he couldn’t sell them. But it was more important to him to do what he wanted to do. And I remember he whittled me a scooter with his own two hands. Not an electric scooter, but the push kind, the ones with wheels and a little platform. He made it for me for my birthday. It was always impressive to see what he could make, and I’m sure that my mother was happy that he got off on his own creativity, but at some point you have to begin to submit to practical needs as well: namely, how do you make money? He didn’t know the answer, and she kept asking the question, and they fought all the time.

Even if we had been living in a secure country, with a secure middle class, they probably still would have fought, but we were at the edge of this new frontier, in this new country, with new neighbors, new languages, and new rules. So my mother’s anxiety about these issues intensified. Whether because of her pressure or my father’s own self-esteem issues, their arguments would sometimes devolve to physical violence. Not terrible beatings, and not one-sided either: I remember that every once in a while one of them would push the other. At one point—I must have been four or so—they were bickering back and forth, and I jumped on my father’s leg and started biting him near his knee. I can’t even say for certain that it was a serious fight, but I was just trying to protect my mother.

Things didn’t get better, and the fact that they weren’t getting better made things worse. My father left Haifa for Tel Aviv, to look for work and take some time away from my mother. When he was gone, my mother started working at a coffeehouse called Café Nitza. I’ll never forget it, because when you pulled up to it, you saw a kind of Mama Beulah figure, a large, fat, happy black woman sipping coffee. Up until that point, I think, I’d never seen a black face of any kind. She was so big and so happy, that face on the sign. I remember as a kid going to see my mother and getting my first cup of coffee and a poppyseed cake. I remember being hit by the caffeine, and I thought I was going to pass out. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. Everything started moving at a different speed; in my mind, I thought I was slurring my words.

My mother liked working. It gave her self-esteem, and she was very disciplined and a very hard worker. But still she wanted to make her marriage work. One day she told me that we were going to see my dad. So we took a trip to Tel Aviv, and we searched in vain for him for a little while. He wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t in any of the places my mother expected to find him. So we went to the movies. I don’t know if my mother suspected he might be there. I don’t know if she was just going to relax for a little while. But in the lobby, I caught sight of my father. He was at the top of the stairs with a blond woman. I turned to my mother and told her, There’s Dad with a blond woman. At the time, I didn’t think of it in terms of jealousy. That didn’t enter into it at all. It was more like a game, looking for my father, and I had won the game by spotting him at the top of the stairs with this blond woman. My mother knew differently. We went to his apartment, and somehow she got a passkey, and we went inside, and she went through his pockets and found condoms in one of them. We went back to Haifa, and the two of us continued with our lives, and that was the last of my father’s role. He didn’t surface again. I have no idea whether my mother tried to make contact privately, and she won’t talk about it to this day. For me, as a child, that was the end of that. The last visual image that I had of my dad was at the top of the stairs with that other woman.

I looked up to my father—he was everything I admired.

After that, it was just the two of us, my mother and me, and she devoted herself to raising me. She went out on a date or two with some guys and would always do her best to explain to me what was happening. I didn’t react very well, probably because I thought that I would lose her affections to somebody else. I became jealous and guarded, and I let her know in no uncertain terms that nobody else was permitted in the arrangement. One way or another, it worked, because my mother stayed single until I was about eighteen or nineteen.

Shortly after my mother and father separated for good, my mother and I moved from Tirat Hacarmel to Vade Jamal, another village in the Haifa area. At that time, I was five or six and starting to get a sense of the kind of country I was living in. For starters, it was a poor country that was just finding its way. Israel worked on a food-stamp system, and you could have meat once a week. Even milk wasn’t something you could just go and buy. You had to get your stamp. There were certain amenities we simply didn’t have. I never saw toilet paper or tissues. We wiped with rags. They were washed. Showers were unheard of. I bathed in a metallic bathtub, and my mother would heat the water up on the stove and then pour it into the bathtub, pot by pot, until it filled up.

Despite that, I was mostly oblivious of the idea of rich or poor. There were bullet holes all over the walls in the apartment where we lived, because three years earlier the Arabs and the Jews were fighting the War of Independence in the streets. But I was oblivious to the bullet holes. It just looked like a building. I do remember one incident: every once in a while my mother would save up money to bake a babka, which is a thick pastry. When she made the frosting to cover the cake, she would let me stick my finger in the pot and taste it. I remember being horrified that there was a big hole in the middle of the pot. And I was embarrassed to say anything to my mother at the time, because I thought she would feel embarrassed herself. But when I did happen to mention it, she started laughing, because in fact, the babka pot that you cook in actually has that big hole in the middle. To me, though, it was just a broken pot, and a sign of our poverty.

I was my mother’s only child. There were no other children, no husband. As a result, she protected me fiercely. We were a team, and she was intent both on raising me right and on ensuring that other people treated me with respect. Some of my most vivid memories are of my mother defending me, which she did passionately. I guess it was her way of announcing to the world that she valued her son and expected the same from everyone else.

My mother used to have these huge thigh-high boots, the kind that plumbers wear, as opposed to the stylish boots that are more familiar to Americans. They were very clunky, and I remember watching those boots go through the dirt as I walked along behind her. One day walking along behind those boots, I saw a neighborhood boy who had a bad habit of throwing rocks. Or more to the point, he had a bad habit of throwing rocks at me. I was minding my own business, and suddenly a rock hit me in the head. My mother moved faster than I had ever seen her move. She chased down this kid and picked him up off the ground by his hand and smacked him so hard that he was swinging like a sack of potatoes. This kid was crying, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stop hitting him. She just kept slapping him. Then she took me by the hand in front of his parents, as if to say, Yeah, what are you going to do about it? Nothing came of it. We walked away.

Another time my mother’s protectiveness actually landed us in the police station. This was slightly later, after I had started school in Vade Jamal, and after I had established myself as the loud kid, the show-off: the kid who always had to go the farthest, the highest, the fastest. There was a fig tree that grew over into the school grounds, although it was rooted in the yard of the woman who lived next door. The kids loved to climb up the part of the tree that was in the schoolyard, then climb down into the neighbor’s yard. When she came out, all the kids would clamber down and scurry away. I was usually the last one down, because I was in the highest branches. One time I was too slow coming down, and the woman caught me. She had a banana stalk in her hand, and she started hitting me with it. I don’t remember how badly she hurt me, only that I was scared and that she knocked the wind out of me. My friends brought me home after school and told my mother about the beating, in front of me.

The next thing I knew, we were back in the street again, and I was behind my mother and her boots, and we were going to the woman’s house. We got to the house, and my mother banged on the door, and the woman came out. I remember being struck by her size. She was big, bigger than my mother, and had a hard look. She must have had a hard life. My mother asked just two questions. The first one was Did you hit my son? The woman said, Yeah, he climbed my tree, and anybody that does that is trying to steal my figs, and I will hit anybody that I see. The second question was What did you hit him with? My mother spoke levelly, as if she were just trying to collect information. The woman said, I’ll show you what I hit him with. She brought out the banana stalk.

My mother grabbed the stalk out of the woman’s hands and started beating her over the head with it. At first, Mom was swinging it with one hand, and then she had it two-handed, as if she were playing baseball, and she was bringing it down on the woman’s head, hard, the way you do with a sledgehammer over a spike. This woman was being drilled into the ground. The woman’s legs gave way, and she was on her butt against the doorway, but even then my mother kept banging her over the head. By the time my mother got through with this woman, I was just amazed, because I’d never seen blood literally spray out of a person’s head like a sprinkler system. It was just spouting out. It looked almost comical. There was blood everywhere. The woman was covered with blood, and my mother was covered with blood. It was hard to believe. It felt almost like a cheap horror movie.

My father at age forty-four.

In short order, because it was a small town, the police were there. There was a police station around the corner from the school. The cops took my mother and myself—we walked, because there were no cop cars—two blocks to the station. The sergeant behind the desk had a huge mustache; you couldn’t see his mouth, it just hung over his lips. Did you— he said to my mother, and before he could even finish, she nodded. Yes, she said. Yes, I hit her over the head. The sergeant asked her why, and she told the story and explained her thinking: whether her son was right or wrong, she said, no one was allowed to lay a hand on him. And then she got carried away, because it was emotional in the retelling, and she must have felt defiant, and she started to yell at the sergeant and told him, If you even so much as look at my son in the wrong way, I’ll split your head open, too. The sergeant repeated that with an expression of disbelief, and the rest of the cops started laughing. Then he let us go.

When I look back on Israel, I find that most of my memories are about my mother, or clothing, or food—the basics. I left when I was still a child, so my personality didn’t really come into its own there, but every once in a while a memory comes up that surprises me with its strength and explains something about myself. For many years, for example, I couldn’t stand the sight of spiders. I dimly remembered an incident from my childhood, but it wasn’t clear. Then it came back to me: one morning my mother was getting ready to go to work, and I was getting ready to go to school, and she put my hat on my head. It didn’t quite fit—there was a lump in it. She took off the hat, saying something about how my hair must be crumpled underneath. While she was talking, the biggest spider I ever saw

Reviews for Kiss and Make-Up

[tajohnson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nicely done, story but you have to ask yourself did the author embellish anything.

[trayceebee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’ve loved KISS since I was a kid in the early 70s. My big brother brought home one of their records, and I remember being entranced by the album cover as their music filled the room. It was an awakening for me! I’ve seen KISS perform live one time, back in 1997, I believe. It was amazing! At that point, I knew what the guys looked like behind the makeup. And yet, seeing Gene Simmons breathe fire and spit blood STILL scared the Crap out of me! Because they OWNED it! Amazing band! Gene does a great job describing his youth, what motivated him to be a rock star, and how he and Paul Stanley made it happen. He gives up some secrets, but not so many that the mystery of KISS is spoiled. He wits quite well!